Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/567

Rh or breaks, and separating us completely from the earth. No isolated clouds hover above this plane. We seem to be citizens of the sky, separated from the earth by a barrier which seems impassable. We are free from all apprehension such as may exist when nothing separates us from the earth. We can suppose the laws of gravitation are for a time suspended, and, in the upper world to which we seem now to belong, the silence and quiet are so intense that peace and calm seem to reign alone." The descriptions of sky and cloud scenes that follow are very picturesque.

Mr. Glaisher was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1849. On the death of Lord Chief-Baron Sir F. Pollock, about 1870, he became the third President of the Photographic Society of Great Britain, an office which he still holds. This society presented to him in 1887 a marble bust of himself, executed under its direction by the sculptor Albert Toft. He was a juror in the class of scientific and philosophical instruments at the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1863, and was the reporter of the class in 1851.

Mr. Glaisher is the author of more than one hundred books and papers relating to astronomy, meteorology, and the theory of numbers. Some of these have already been mentioned. Among the others are many papers in the "Proceedings of the British Association" relating to his balloon ascensions and the subjects of his special investigations. His best-known work is "Travels in the Air," of which he is joint author, which is composed of the narratives by himself of his own balloon voyages and observations, and accounts by M. Gaston Tissandier and M. de Fonvielle of their experiments in the same line. He edited and compressed the English version of Camille Flammarion's "Atmosphere," performing, in addition to the regular labor of such a task, that of reducing the notations of the French system to their equivalents in English units, and replacing French observations and data with English corresponding ones. In 1877 he translated and edited Amedée Guillemin's "World of Comets." After he retired from the Royal Observatory he devoted himself to the completion of the factor tables, begun by Burckhardt in 1814 and continued by Dace in 1862-'65; Burckhardt published the first three millions, and Dace the seventh, eighth, and ninth millions. The three intervening millions have been calculated by Mr. Glaisher and published, with a full enumeration relating to the whole nine millions, in three quarto volumes. Since 1880 Mr. Glaisher has been chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund.